Fred Manalli

More and more bizarre. This is only still on the surface stuff. Take a look at the bottom left of the Cheri Jo Bates letter where I have overlaid in red to show how strokes and so on line up. Well I can do that with the other stuff too, including the car door. There's just loads of things that line up and it's like adding pieces to puzzle. As I'm moving words around on pages they keep lining up with things I'm moving them over even if they aren't the same letters. I didn't have a really close look at the symbol on the Bates letter because, as you can see, I got distracted by other things.

So here's the citizen letter with more stuff on it, one of the bates letters and the car door (the m's are for Manalli, as usual.

Manelli's writing slants the opposite way from Zodiac.
Also, crossing over of the number 4 Zodiac didn't do that.
crossing over of the little e as well.

onewhoknows wrote:

Manelli's writing slants the opposite way from Zodiac.
Also, crossing over of the number 4 Zodiac didn't do that.
crossing over of the little e as well.

That's only ONE 4 from Manalli VS ONE 4 of Zodiac's. We need multiple from both to compare. As far as slants, all you need to do is turn your arm or the paper at an odd writing angle to distort that. Too many similarities going for me to ignore.

This one does it for me....

Half way down, on the right side, Zodiac's writing of the word 'THIS' compared side by side to Manalli's writing of the word 'HIS', they are basically a match, and even have the same spacing.

Thanks to Seagull, we have a good amount of writing from Manalli. Seagull, was this all of the stuff on file in that box at the university? I dont want to get it if it is the stuff you already have. Also, any luck with the PARADISE book by Manalli?

Trav, is it just me, or does Manalli seem to be mostly writing in cursive in his late Aug 69 letter,compared to the writing prior to that date when he wrote alot more printed writing?

there actually is a zodiac 4 that crosses over I think but I can't find it. I have it on my list of his numbers right at the bottom, there's only 1 but as I said I can't find where I found it from. Bear in mind that if Manalli can be linked to the bates letters then there's proof in those that he used 2 different types of 4 one that does cross over and one that doesn't. Also out of 8 - 10 pages of handwriting that I have Manalli only uses one 4. There's about another 140 pages or so I think.

As Morf says there's too many similarities here to just ignore. The form and flow of the letters (mirrored or not). Don't forget not all of zodiacs writing was slanted either.

Basically there's a lot going here and I will keep going and finding more similarities but beyond that I could only suggest that someone qualified take a look at this guys writing. I could argue points all day on this but it wouldn't be helpful because at this stage I need clarification and guidance about this stuff that I can't answer myself. I'm seeing something in this but is it important or even real. Can't say, don't know.

Gut instinct is that there is something here. Why are there so many similarities across so many different pieces of zodiac material (confirmed and other). Is this normal? Again I don't know.

morf13 wrote:

Trav, is it just me, or does Manalli seem to be mostly writing in cursive in his late Aug 69 letter,compared to the writing prior to that date when he wrote alot more printed writing?

Yes I think so. There is a difference and I would say that his writing has changed over the years. I had noted it and my friend pointed out the same thing.

morf13 wrote:

Thanks to Seagull, we have a good amount of writing from Manalli. Seagull, was this all of the stuff on file in that box at the university? I dont want to get it if it is the stuff you already have. Also, any luck with the PARADISE book by Manalli?

I got all the stuff I could possibly get from the university. Manalli's things were in multiple boxes and I'm pretty darn sure I found everything available.

Getting the Paradise book, actually a short story in a university magazine, will take time. They want $$ which can only be done by the USPS. As the saying goes, "It's in the mail."

what was his middle name btw? Starts with an S.

Middle name of Steven.

DOB March 7, 1935
DOD Aug. 25, 1976

Trav, not to give you too much homework, but you also may want to look at the code key sent to Vallejo PD after the first cipher from Zodiac:
https://zodiackillersite.forummotion.com/t833-zodiac-code-key-sent-to-vallejo-pd-8-10-69
Alot of people think Zodiac likely mailed the key to Vallejo PD, so this writing may be of interest to us

onewhoknows wrote:

Manelli's writing slants the opposite way from Zodiac.
Also, crossing over of the number 4 Zodiac didn't do that.
crossing over of the little e as well.

I spoke once to a handwriting analyst and she said that one of the most common techniques people use to disguise their handwriting is to slope it one way or another. The slant of the writing is not usually considered a strong factor in analysis for that reason. A corollary to that - a handwriting disguised by a slant only, doesn't change the actual formation of the letters.

This one was fun. You can see how Manalli's writing fits over zodiacs and you can move it around and it still slots into space lining up with what's underneath with letters and spaces and certain angles matching up.

bentley wrote:

Six foot three is a bit tall for Z too I think. Someone would have noticed, Fouke should have.

There is a DOJ statement that says Fouke once put Zodiac's height as tall as six-foot-two. Bryan Hartnell did the same.

The sexual component to Manalli's crimes makes me iffy, and his physical appearance doesn't seem heavyset enough, but everything else looks solid, particularly the military background and the handwriting. Also, the Z-like symbol at the end of each 'Bates had to die' letter does kind of look like an 'm' crossed with a 'z'. Good work, guys; let's see what else we can dig up.

It never ends. lol.

So here we have the Exorcist Letter comparied to Manalli. Even some of the cursive seems to fit. Note the gap in the word something in both cases. There is another example in Manalli's of the word something that's the same.

As for the rest. It's that weird mirror image thing again.

This is really kind of amazing, Trav! I wonder, if this guy wrote the Desktop Poem, maybe he purposefully put his name in it: if red

I am going to check with my NAPA contact and ask him flat out if he can look up Manalli and see if he was ever 'officially' ruled out as a suspect via prints, etc. Normally, police can't tell you that,but I am hoping since I can prove he is deceased, that they might simply tell me.

In the meantime Trav, great work as always....the similarities continue

Got any 2s?

bentley wrote:

Got any 2s?

Yes, and Manalli does them in both Z-like 2's as Zodiac did normally and the 2's with a curl at the top

Ok...I can't keep my mouth zipped.










You guys really think this looks alike?

Jem wrote:

This is really kind of amazing, Trav! I wonder, if this guy wrote the Desktop Poem, maybe he purposefully put his name in it: if red

Hehehe nice thinking. I hadn't noticed that again this time round but I think it noticed the last time I was comparing the desk to the citizen letter and wondered if there was anyone called fred. Funny thing is that even if it is that guy - I think that's probably just a weird coincidence but you never know.

I noticed something else whilst working on the Exorcist letter. I could be wrong but I don't Zodiac spelled satirical wrong, I mean he did but not by accident. I think he swapped the i from satirical with the e from comedy probably just because he could due to them being phonetically similar. A little fun with words. If that's already been noted, fair enough but it's the first time I've spotted it.

Yup Bentley as morph said we've got the 2's various types of. There's quite a few doubles in this guys stuff ie variations of certain characters one of which matches zodiac. Then there's the g's I think there's 3 of those and they match all 3 variation used by zodiac.

There's not just the similarities in letterforms, it's the spacing and all that stuff. Take the word something for instance. I could probably have found a better match in Manalli's writing but since there's a fair bit to hunt through I just grabbed an example when I saw it and intend to replace it if I found a less cursive one. Turns out I didn't need to, it just slots right in there, cursive or not and matches up visually for spacing. The fact that I'm getting what I see as matches using cursive vs print is interesting.

Despite being the person finding this stuff I'm still not sure what to make of it. A real document examiner might look at this and say it's 99% but look here, this little thingy here rules it out as a complete match. Do lot's of continuing little OMG moments add up to a smoking gun eventually, probably not, maybe you just end up with something gun shaped until you can make it smoke.

If this all turns out to be nothing more than coincidence then at least we can all see just how close writing can be and still not be a match. A benchmark of sorts. I wan't to make it clear that until we know differently, everything I've found is a similarity and not a match but I will sometimes call it a match cause it's quicker to type lol.

Please excuse the long posts. I've been letting the images do the talking and as such I'm trying to convey now the sense of similarity of getting of this stuff. I could, in the examples shown so far ,have gone much further. I could probably fill those pages with matches, letter by letter, punctuation by punctuation but it becomes very hard to see what's what and so on each one I've stopped short of doing that so as to cleanly show some similarities.

It should be logically obvious by now that if I'm getting similarities of the stuff I have so far then there's lots, lots more that can be found. There's similarities to the Bates letters, I've already seen more stuff that might pair up to those. If there's similarities to the Exorcist letter and one of zodiac's first letters then it's makes sense that there will be more similarities throughout the zodiac stuff.

Ok I'm off to look at that key code thing now.

tahoe27 wrote:

Ok...I can't keep my mouth zipped.










You guys really think this looks alike?

I do Tahoe. I know you can't compare cursive to printing but look at the spacing of the letters and the gaps. The construction of the g on something. As I said it's not just this one example, look back and see how Mananlli has a variation on the g to match all of variations shown throughout the bates and zodiac stuff. He also has the same thing happening with the y,s and the k's and the 2's , the w's (cursive and print) both examples of rounded and sharp w's. There's probably more and to reiterate these matches are all from Manalli's variations not his norm which is also there in his writing naturally, and the variations aren't one-off's they are re-occurring. So it's not just a case of, oh that looks similar, there's also the fact that these matches are there at all in something you wouldn't expect - ie' mostly cursive.

Also as pointed out this is all from only 8-10 pages of Manalli's writing.

None of this of course has to mean anything. This guy might not have been within a hundred miles of the zodiac stuff when it was written but surely you must concede that there are similarities in form and style and use of variations of certain letters.

Ok got distracted. Here's Manalli's numbers compared to Zodiac's.

tahoe27 wrote:

Ok...I can't keep my mouth zipped.










You guys really think this looks alike?

Tahoe, the sample here Trav is showing of Manalli's is cursive against printed Zodiac writing. In this instance, Trav is showing that Manalli & Zodiac BOTH write the word 'something' like 'SOME THING'.

Tahoe, even if you discount the writing, does this guy not even interest you in the least when he discusses doing acts violence & attacks, and breaking the law "which is nothing new" to free up his writer's block?

traveller1st wrote:

...surely you must concede that there are similarities in form and style and use of variations of certain letters.

Just not enough for me. The majority of it isn't even close.

As discussed Zodiac never used cursive--connecting his letters. You think ONCE that would have slipped through. Nope. Some gaps, etc....eh.


I'll REALLY not say anymore now.